International Society for Biosemiotic Studies
Symbolic Concepts and Physicality In this paper, I will address four aspects of physicality as they relate to symbolic concepts: science and symbolic concepts, entropy, self-organization, and biological energy. I have suggested that certain concepts do not have exclusively physical referents. They refer to concepts that lack mass, energy, and observability, but nevertheless, they […]
The biosemiotic process: How to reproduce and adapt the identity of social systems by combining emotions and language Biosemiotics concerns the process of learning of complex adaptive systems that operate across multiple scales and levels of organization. This comprises the formation of informed autocatalytic processes (functional cycles) that can express an adaptable identity by […]
A Biosemiotic Approach to Gender: Avoiding Morphological Freedom This paper proposes a biosemiotic approach to gender. I argue that, in order for biosemiotic theory to be properly relevant for the humanities and social sciences in general, a biosemiotic discourse on gender and sexuality is needed. Also, I explain that a biosemiotic approach to gender is […]
The Cognitive Spiral: Semiotic Freedom & Space Space has history and has taken different forms in different societies and at different times depending on the experiences accounted for and the available means to externalise and represent these (Jammer 2013). The representation is conditional on the technique used, delineating a cognitive loop between representation and comprehension […]
Diagnosing, Modelling and Solving Interspecies Cohabitation Issues: Anatomy of the Shared Semiosphere In this communication, I will present different steps of diagnosing and modelling a shared urban semiosphere in order to solve interspecies cohabitation issues. Mainly, this presentation will introduce key concepts needed for this work and methods used – what elements should be included […]
Time and Emergence: Towards a narrative inspired understanding of temporal semiosis What is the nature of time? Since the Einstein-Bergson debate this question has often been divided into two camps. One camp approaching space-time in a point-like manner in terms of mathematics and/or physics, and a second camp favouring an anthropocentric phenomenological approach which understands […]
Refining how the term ‘Icon’ is conceived as a Step towards Nomothetic Descriptions of Behavioral-Ecological Events The term icon is ubiquitous. For example, in linguistics iconicity is conceived as the relationship between speech acts and meaning whereas in semiotics broadly, iconicity is conceived as a grounded relationship between an icon and its referent. While these […]
The Ontological Primacy of Umwelt Individuation – the genesis of individual entities – is generally presumed to begin with the ontology of already constituted individuals. Thus claims Gilbert Simondon. Rather than describing the appearance of individual beings from something pre-individual, the analysis of the appearance of concrete entities usually concerns itself with the appearance of […]
An Evening with Jesper Hoffmeyer In this half-hour video presentation, Jesper Hoffmeyer recounts his early days as a “positivist” biochemist, his involvement with the radical student movement in Denmark and Paris in 1968, and how he came to help initiate the current project of biosemiotics – as well as how he sees the future […]
In 2019, shortly after the death of our dear friend and colleague, Jesper Hoffmeyer, a number of us began making plans for a Memorial Conference in his honour to take place the following spring at the University of Copenhagen. The arrival of the COVID pandemic in March of that year put an end to that plan, as international travel […]